• WHAT: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell of cooking bacon.  The aroma wakes you up, then you can open the oven component and eat the bacon itself.

• HOW: You put a strip of shelf-stable bacon in the drawer at night. The next morning, a pair of halogen lights slowly cook the bacon to a crisp and a fan blows the aroma out of the pig’s nostrils.

• WHY: Waking up to the smell is bacon is more enjoyable than waking up to an alarm.

• WHO: For carnivores who hate waking up.

It was a class project at NYU

First, I hacked a cheap alarm clock. When the alarm goes off in an alarm clock, the clock is sending a signal in the form of a wavelength along a wire to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. I cut that wire and re-routed it to a pin on a microchip. The microchip was programmed to respond to that particular wavelength input by triggering a relay to send power to a pair of halogen lightbulbs that safely heat the bacon to a crisp.

…then it went viral

I posted it on my blog. Then Good Morning America asked me to come on. Then Shark Tank asked me to come on. I thought, "It'll be a good story to tell the grandkids."